Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server apparatus storing print data, a printing apparatus, and a printing system.
Description of the Related Art
There is provided a printing system known as “pull-print system”. In the pull-print system, authentication of a user is executed by a printing apparatus, and a printing request for user's print data stored in a print management server is provided from the printing apparatus, so that the print data is printed by the printing apparatus. According to the pull-print printing system, because print data corresponding to an authenticated user is printed by a printing apparatus, security thereof can be improved.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-99714 discusses the following printing system. According to the above-described printing system, integrated circuit (IC) card authentication processing is executed by a multifunction peripheral, and print data of an authenticated user is identified by a print management server. Then, a printing command is transmitted to a print server that stores the identified print data, so that the print data of the authenticated user is printed by a desired printer.
In the above-described printing system, print data and bibliographic information data received from an application program are stored in the print server and the print management server, so that the printing processing is executed by a desired printing apparatus according to an output instruction.
According to the printing system discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-99714, in order to improve the security of the printing system, printing processing employing the IC card authentication can be executed. However, displaying a list for inputting a printing instruction on a desired printing apparatus may require time.
More specifically, in the above-described printing system, print data is managed according to the bibliographic information. Therefore, the printing system waits until transmission of the print data is completed, and when it is determined that the transmission thereof is completed, the printing system generates a bibliographic information file. This is because the information such as a name of the print data, an owner's name (a name of sender's computer), and the number of pages are included in the bibliographic information within the bibliographic information file, and the information such as the number of pages cannot be determined until receiving processing of the print data is completed. Further, in a case where a total number of pages for the print data is provided by a printer driver as the attribute information of the print data, the print data will not be regarded as received officially until the print server (i.e., print data storage server) has completed the receiving processing of the print data.
Therefore, in practice, the bibliographic information file is created after the print data has been received completely. Then, when the printing apparatus receives the bibliographic information file, the print data is displayed as a list of data on which the user can provide an output instruction.
Therefore, in a case where a printing operation of the print data having a large number of pages or a large volume of data is to be executed, unless spooling and transmission processing of the print data (i.e., receiving processing executed by the print server) has been completed, the user cannot provide a printing instruction because a list relating to that print data will not be displayed on the printing apparatus.
The user cannot know the time taken by the printing apparatus to display a list after the user has executed the printing operation on the application. Therefore, in a case where a list of desired print data is not displayed on the printing apparatus, the user has to stay at the installation site of the printing apparatus to repeatedly reload a list display screen.